


Connectivity

by thedevilchicken



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Captivity, Cyborgs, Dubious Consent, Fight Sex, Fights, Interrogation, M/M, Medical Procedures, Torture, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2019-07-15 08:04:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16058969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Grievous tries a new kind of interrogation on Obi-Wan. This doesn't go quite according to plan.





	Connectivity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shanlyrical](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shanlyrical/gifts).



"I have a gift for you, Jedi," Grievous says, and Obi-Wan has to admit that even if he's not entirely sure he won't regret it, he's still curious. 

The general sweeps back his cloak. He's carrying a box tucked in underneath one metal arm that he sets down on the metal table with a dull clank of durasteel on steel, and he steps back with a smug kind of flourish. He looks like he thinks he's won something and the overall effect is unsettling. 

"Open it," Grievous says. He pulls himself up straight and tall, as if his stature can intimidate Obi-Wan into following his orders, after all this time. 

Obi-Wan is not intimidated; he knows he shouldn't be, and he should force that impulse down, but he's curious. He can't quite see curiosity as a flaw because over the years it's made him a much better man if not a better Jedi, and so he moves towards the table. He flips open the box and lets the lid hit the tabletop with that same dull clank, just louder. 

"Do you like it?" Grievous asks. The smugness of it seems almost artificial, and Obi-Wan glances up him, then he looks back down at the box. 

"Is it yours?" he replies. 

"Of course." 

There's a heart in the box. A synthetic one must be pumping inside the general's chest, stronger than the original, and he clearly thinks he's won. 

"Now I'm rid of you," Grievous says, triumphant. 

And Obi-Wan knows he's what's driven him to this. 

\--

Obi-Wan Kenobi has been a Separatist prisoner for a few days more than fourteen months. 

For the most part, his treatment has been what you might call fair, especially when considering what he knows of the other Separatist hostages. He hasn't seen any others personally, at least not in the place that he's usually kept, which he can only assume is Grievous's lair on the third moon of Vassek. But sometimes, when they transport him, he can hear them. He wonders who they are and what the Separatists are doing to them, but that may be one instance when his curiosity is best left unsatisfied. 

He was interrogated, of course, after Grievous first took him, but for the first three weeks it was Dooku who took care of that, in his castle on Serenno. Obi-Wan has to admit that the whole affair felt somewhat like they were going through the motions, and to some extent that assessment is likely correct: by that point in proceedings, Dooku had to have known him well enough to know he wouldn't talk, no matter how he tried to break him. He tried to break Obi-Wan's mind, with a look throughout that said he almost didn't expect success. He used the Force to try to break him through pain, but those attempts met with the same flavour of failure. 

And then, General Grievous came to visit; when the general left to return to his own base, he took Obi-Wan with him. 

What happened started on the fifth day, or close enough to it that the count made no difference, once torture and threats had failed to yield from him the answers that the general wanted. Grievous tried another tack. Obi-Wan was only surprised that it had taken so long for him to tired of _no_.

He remembers the sickly-sweet smell of the gas that knocked him out, how the room seemed to tilt, and how he fell but didn't feel it when he hit the floor. He remembers flashes after that: droids, bright lights, corridors scrolling by, the echo of Grievous's laughter drowned out by the sound of a drill. He remembers waking, after, an awful taste in his mouth and a throbbing in his head and when he touched his fingers to the back of it, he found a small patch of shaved hair, dried blood, and neat stitches. He felt sick. He had no idea what the'd done to him, until he reached out with the Force and felt something foreign there inside his head. They'd put something into him with an odd metal tab that rested at the surface, a circle standing just a fraction proud. He had no idea what it was, only _that_ it was. 

He remembers scouring the room for a way out and finding none, knowing he couldn't have held his own weight even had he been successful. He remembers knowing he was being watched but not being sure from where. And then he passed out again. 

It started when he woke some hours later and found himself strapped down against a chilly metal table, completely unable to move. The reflection in the ceiling panels up above him showed some kind of large machine and a net of thin wires connected to it, trailing down from what he supposed was a port at the back of his head. At that point, his vision faded as if cued; the last thing he saw in those reflective panels was Grievous sitting nearby, with identical wires trailing from an unseen port at the back of his neck, down into that same machine. 

As his consciousness faded, Obi-Wan understood: this was just another form of interrogation. He would simply have to find a way to resist, as he'd resisted the others before it. He believed he could. He had to believe he could.

In the beginning, once the machine began to whir and the connected was established, Obi-Wan's unconscious mind just couldn't adequately process what was happening. He recalls the disorientation of the new space that he suddenly, jarringly inhabited: a bright, empty cube with no apparent exit where not a single thing he saw or touched felt right because the Force was wholly absent there, even from inside himself. He attempted to reach out for it, instinctively, but it wasn't there to reach for. He reached for his own name and found that lacking, too. Then Grievous laughed. Then Grievous attacked. 

Without the Force in him, it wasn't what anyone might reasonably call a fight - it was a beating. It was metal fists against human skin that split over bones that fractured awkwardly beneath. He pushed himself up to his hands and knees and spat blood onto the floor that looked pink against the strange white backlight of the tiles. And, when he was convinced that was the end of it, convinced that he was going to die with just one more strike of Grievous's fist and that the only fight he had remaining in him was a final pithy if sagging retort, the simulation came to an abrupt and total end. He woke. His heart was racing. All Grievous said was, "Take him away." 

In his cell, on the ground, in the dim orange light, he remembered every crack and split and bruise. The memory of it was not the issue, however. 

If Grievous had asked him questions, he hadn't heard them. He certainly hadn't answered them, but he couldn't call that a victory; if Grievous had no questions, his motivations were likely much, much worse. 

\--

Obi-Wan can't say he learned a lot about the Kaleesh before the start of the war. He knew the general outline of the situation between them and the Yam'rii, in which the Jedi had somewhat regrettably involved themselves, but he knew very little about their planet or their customs or even their biology, which he has groan to understand differs quite substantially from his own. Once General Grievous had begun to make a nuisance of himself, however, Obi-Wan took to the archives with considerable gusto and consumed every scrap of information on the subject. His intent had been to better understand his enemy and to an extent he succeeded in that; in the end, though, Grievous so often seemed to be the exception that proved the rule.

Some Kaleesh don't understand manipulation. Their language is blunt and to the point and it contains no native word for _lie_ , or _deceive_ , or _mislead_ \- they borrowed those from Basic after the Jedi took the Yam'rii's side. Occasionally, Obi-Wan and Grievous argue the nuances of that, because the Jedi didn't lie. They did the wrong thing, perhaps, but mistakes are not lies. They didn't lie, they disappointed.

In the beginning, and for a long time afterwards, fighting was all that Grievous used the system for. By stimulating certain areas of the brain, it seemed he could create in Obi-Wan a mildly amnesiac state: while they were connected, he didn't even know his own name, because all he knew was that Grievous intended to kill him. But things moved on from there. Questionless days turned to questionless weeks, and then months. Where Grievous travelled, Obi-Wan travelled, kept restrained so that he couldn't escape - several rescues were attempted, and several rescues failed. In the night, in his cell, he liked to imagine that Anakin was formulating a plan, but with each passing day he understood just how much more unlikely that became. All that he could do was seek to use the situation to his own advantage.

As the months passed, as he watched Grievous, the shine seemed to wear off the fighting and the strange brand of anonymity to the fact that in that place, Obi-Wan didn't know him. What began as nightly visits to the metal table became every two days, then maybe more, and all that Grievous did was pace the corridor outside Obi-Wan's cell. The pauses gave Obi-Wan all the time he needed. Bit by bit, he pushed back. Bit by bit, he wrested control, until one night the fist that struck his cheek was no longer metal and behind the mask his face was flesh and blood and bone. He was the man who he'd once been.

"Who are you?" Grievous asked him, the tone of his undistorted voice more demand than question. They circled each other warily. "Are you my enemy? Is that why we're fighting?"

"I think we're fighting because you're not entirely sure what else to do with me," Obi-Wan replied, quite truthfully. "I suppose I might be valuable one day. Or perhaps you've become attached to the routine of it."

Grievous attacked. Obi-Wan dodged. Inside that place he had no grounding in the Force, but he had his wits and his training; Grievous, flesh and blood, a warrior, was still more than his match. Grievous pinned him to the backlit tiles, gold eyes on him as Obi-Wan's heart raced. And, in that moment, he understood how he might finally tip the scales in his own favour.

When he pulled off Grievous's mask, he didn't stop him. He didn't stop him brushing the back of one hand against the point of one hard tusk or wrapping his legs around his waist. Obi-Wan understood Kaleesh anatomy. He knew how to touch him, how to stimulate him, how to pique his interest and stiffen his cock. He knew exactly what to do to make him gasp and writhe and come. 

And, when the cube room snapped out of focus and he woke up on the table, Grievous was already stalking away. As Obi-Wan had before, it seemed he remembered.

\--

The first time was not the last time. The first time was at four months. Now, it's more than fourteen.

For a week, Grievous didn't return. It was the longest period of time that he had been away since taking Obi-Wan from Dooku's castle, but Obi-Wan understood - he'd unsettled him, which had been, of course, the desired response. Perhaps the things that Grievous had done to him before hadn't gone away, but that meant what he'd done would linger, too.

For a week, Grievous didn't return, but then there he was. He made the connection, and for a moment they struggled in a barely conscious place before Obi-Wan pushed past into control. The flesh and blood Grievous there in that white room let him strip him down and press his mouth to bare skin. He let him coax his long, thick cock from its hidden cavity inside him, slicked thickly with his arousal. Obi-Wan ran his fingers down the shaft to the wet slit at its base and teased there, just inside, against his balls or the Kaleesh equivalent, and made Grievous growl down in his throat. Then he straddled Grievous's hips. He guided the tip of his cock up between his cheeks, against his hole. He took him in. He let him stretch him open. He rode him. He gasped. He came. And when they woke, Grievous put his fist through three screens and left the room in a dramatic shower of sparks.

Two days later, he returned; Obi-Wan fucked the tight, slick slit between Grievous's thighs, their cocks rubbing together in it until Grievous couldn't keep it in. Obi-Wan went down on his hands and knees and Grievous pushed inside him. Three days later, he returned; they struggled, barely a fight at all, till Obi-Wan tongued him, and his cock stiffened, and as it pushed out it pushed deeper past his lips into his waiting mouth. Grievous wound his clawed fingers into Obi-Wan's ruffled hair. Obi-Wan stroked himself, because he knew Grievous could see it. They didn't exactly last long.

And then, one night, weeks later, Obi-Wan didn't win. Grievous took control. And, after the first metal punch split his lip and cricked his neck, Grievous's hands turned Kaleesh instead of cyborg. He chose that. As they looked at each other, that was a fact of which they were both acutely aware. It didn't stop them, that night or any other, though he knows the resentment that Grievous has felt. He can feel it in him, faintly, beside that other thing they don't acknowledge. The other thing is just a product of his long captivity. He's almost sure.

When Grievous is in control, Obi-Wan doesn't stand a chance. He's not much better off when Grievous isn't, frankly; the only weakness he could exploit is that Grievous cannot use the Force, not after his transfusions, not after any of his enhancements. He is not entirely sure he would get far, so long he's been away.

And now, Grievous's heart is in a box. Now, he's even more disconnected from the Force than he ever was before, and Obi-Wan so nearly feels sorry for that.

"Now I'm rid of you," Grievous says, but Obi-Wan doesn't believe that and it's not just because he hasn't killed him yet, not for fourteen months, and so perhaps not ever. He doesn't believe it because in his study of the Kaleesh, he came to understand that the seat of their emotions is not the heart. It's the blood in their veins, and Grievous lost that years ago. 

The Kaleesh have no word for _lie_ or for _liar_. Grievous's vocoder can't quite imitate the sounds of his native tongue. Since his transformation, he's learned to speak Basic very well.

The heart means nothing to the Kaleesh. The heart is a human symbol. And Obi-Wan, despite it all, knows what that means. 

He closes the box. He steps forward, and Grievous watches him. He reaches up, and he rests his warm hands against the cold metal of Grievous's chest plate. He moves one up. He touches fingertips to what's left of his skin, by the cold orbit of one eye, and Grievous flinches but he doesn't move away.

The connection they share is more than wires and implants, or then again perhaps it's not. But the intensity of what Grievous feels now is quite real, despite all the parts he's had cut away. 

Rescue might never come, and Obi-Wan is not safe here. But perhaps he doesn't want to be.


End file.
